Hope in Syria?

It is make-or-break time in Syria: Either there will be war, or something like it—months or even years of continued bloody strife—or there will be talking, power-brokering deals, and something like peace. Late Saturday morning, a U.N. Security Council resolution to send a modest advance team of monitors to Syria passed with Russia’s approval. Previous attempts at resolutions on Syria—for instance, to condemn the regime’s use of violence against civilian protesters—were consistently thwarted by vetoes from Russia, the major ally of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and by China—which, having come up with nothing original in the way of a policy on Syria, has been content to merely ape Moscow’s positions. This time, the vote was unanimous.

In the year since Syria’s cycle of violence began, at least nine thousand people have been killed, a casualty figure that mounts distressingly every day, and which has looked increasingly certain to lead to a full-fledged civil war. At the moment, most of the killing is being done by the regime, using overwhelming force against a lightly-armed disparate opposition and those civilians who happen to get in the way. In the past two days, after the regime agreed to a cease-fire—one part of an ambitious peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan, the former U.N. Secretary General, that is still being picked over by Assad and the Russians—there have been more deaths, but less than the usual daily dozens. It is a welcome respite, but everything still hangs, ominously so, in the balance. The stakes are very high.

The new U.N. resolution is a major diplomatic breakthrough, although its immediate results are likely to be modest in the extreme, and the whole initiative may well collapse in failure very quickly. As part of the peace plan, Assad must pull back his military forces from the blighted neighborhoods and towns they now occupy and from where they currently shell and blast Syria’s rebels at will. It seems a tall order to expect that he will do so, having bloodily gained that same ground since his nationwide military offensive began two and a half months ago, after the failure of a previous international observer mission—that time a month-long stint by diplomats representing the Arab League. (I reported from Syria on the fighting for The New Yorker.)

The prospect that a group of U.N. “observers” might somehow prevent bloodshed may seem depressingly risible, given their dismal showings in other violent arenas in modern times (Kigali, Srebrenica, and Dili all come to mind.) Still, this is the first forward momentum the U.N. has mustered since dispatching Annan there to begin his shuttle diplomacy, and there is always hope that somehow, with the U.N. on the ground, they won’t simply be played as useful fools by the regime, but actually muster something like a muscular deterrent force, and even provide the political ways and means for Syrians to come to terms with each other and find peace. What a thing that would be to contemplate: a United Nations to be proud of.

Photograph: Kofi Annan arrives at the Yayladagi refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border on Tuesday. AFP/Getty.